Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Age Appropriate Content

I am a hardcore believer in the idea of free speech, open exchange of ideas, and the fundamental goodness of knowledge. Censorship in all its forms is anathema to me. The best use I can think of for a time machine would be to go back and save copies of the books that were burned throughout history.

I'm also a person who believes that children are people, and deserve to be treated like human beings. These two passions of mine combine whenever the phrase "age appropriate" is uttered to send me into a sputtering, incoherent rage. Thank goodness for the written word, where I can be articulate even in moments like these where I can't vocalize anything beyond threats and obscenities at best and animal snarls at worst.

Somehow the adults of this society have fallen into thinking that information about sex has the same effect as cracking open Lovecroft's Necromonicon. I mean this quite literally with numerous pieces of propaganda being spread that claim that children "exposed" to "age inappropriate content" display the same symptoms as those who were directly sexually abused. If I believed for one second that molesting a child would do no more harm than them seeing a RedTube video, I would have done so ages ago.

Since the dawn of the internet, an enormous industry has sprung up to censor it. Governments try to block content they don't like, and not just dictatorships like China. The likes of Sweeden have gotten into the act of censoring explicit sexual content for everyone "for the children". Home based firewall solutions have been the flavor of choice for the rugged individualists in the United States, but whether the nanny is the state or the parent, the internet is being censored.

The censorship efforts don't stop at blocking the content itself, however. After all, if the consequences were really so horrific, it would be criminally irresponsible to stop there. No, efforts are made to ensure that young people never develop the knowledge base to frame the questions that might lead to them seeing something "age inappropriate" in the first place.

Avoiding the subjects of sex and sexuality isn't a silent, seamless act. A five year old can tell when you're dancing around a subject you don't want to talk about. That's where shaming starts. They know that whatever it is you don't want to talk about, it's shameful and taboo. That is, in fact, the first thing they learn about it when you behave this way. This discourages them from asking questions, because that would mean violating the taboo they've already learned is in place.

Of course, discouraging questions is more thorough than that. When adults do respond to questions about sex, they always give as little information as possible. The idea, of course, is that they should only give them as much information as they explicitly ask for, lest they be "exposing" those children to sexual knowledge. The trouble with this method is, again, a five year old can figure out that you don't want to give a complete answer for some reason, and will thus be discouraged from asking those followup questions that this method theoretically relies upon.

If you're old enough to ask the question, you're old enough to know the answer. The whole answer. If you can articulate the question of how to define acceleration mathematically, you're old enough to learn calculus. If you're old enough to ask about sex, you're old enough to get a thorough overview of the subject matter.

But what of that most universal followup question to the clinical minimalism so many people prefer? "Why would anyone want to do that?" It's the most important question in any discussion of sex, and it's the one that's explicitly left out of sexual education curriculums and parental lectures alike. Surely answering that question will just make them go out and do it, right?

They asked the question. They're going to want to know the answer, and it can either come from you actually answering the question, or it can come from them experimenting in whatever unsupervised time they have available. And they'll wait for the unsupervised time because, again, by not answering the question, you're communicating that the subject is taboo and that any further attempts to get answers should be hidden from you.

I'm not above exploiting the violent hysteria and frothing hatrid people have for my kind in order to advance my causes, and this is one that matters to me. The children who are most vulnerable to child molesters are the ones who are most ignorant and have been taught most thoroughly that sex is a taboo. If they don't know what sex is, they've no reason not to believe that this new "game" is legitimately just that. Your efforts to silence their awkward questions also silences any hope of them telling you they've been molested.